More on corporate control of our laws

From Truthout:

Exposed: The Other ALECs' Corporate Playbook

By Steve Horn and Sarah Blaskey, Truthout | News Analysis

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Thomas Hawk, Rob Shenk)
How is it that no matter whom we elect as our state representatives - Democrat, Republican, or other - we most often end up with policies that privilege the corporate agenda over the public interest?
It's a simple question, raised by laws promoting charter schools, fracking, union-busting, privatization, deregulation, and countless other corporate-friendly policies that have spread like wildfire around the country, particularly in recent legislative sessions.

As it turns out, the answer is relatively simple. Big business in the United States has perfected a legislative "playbook" - a methodical strategy for turning the wish list of multinational corporations into a state-level policy agenda with bipartisan support.

You remember ALEC, featured here on this blog as sponsor of laws like Arizona's anti-immgration law (which turns a profit for private prisons but does not reduce immigration) and Florida's Stand Your Ground law (which results in dead innocent people, usually black).

In this article, the six-stage strategy is illustrated, showing how corporations get laws passed in their interests. And you can do is vote, write a letter or email, or make a phone call.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/9889-exposed-the-other-alecs-corporate-playbook

From campus news to ALEC

In class, we saw that most news is bad news.

This holds true in the annual review of our student paper. Most of the stories are stories of bad news:

Campus reacts to accusations

Professor ousted from classroom

Solar Homestead brings recognition for sustainability

Coming Out Day messages vandalized

Assault kick-starts hate crime debate

Obama stops in Boone

Tuition increases further      

We also learned that corporations and the powerful, including groups like ALEC, often work behind the scenes to control the laws of our nation.

In this article, the news shows what happens to ALEC once the sheet is pulled off its deeds.

On May 11, 2012, about 20 state legislators from 15 oil- and gas-rich states are scheduled to meet in a hotel conference room in Charlotte. Representatives from major energy companies will be there, too. Oil and gas lobbying groups will give presentations to the lawmakers on fossil fuel prices and the need for modernizing the nation’s power grid. But no “lobbying” will take place. What happens in Charlotte will be called education.

For three decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the meeting’s host, has brought together corporations (including Pfizer (PFE), AT&T (T), and ExxonMobil (XOM)) and state legislators to write what it calls model bills—pieces of legislation the industries would like to become law. Often this means protecting favored tax treatment or keeping regulations at bay. ALEC has also approved model bills on social issues, including gun control and voter registration. The bills then get passed around among the 1,800 mostly Republican legislators who are ALEC members. They introduce the model bills about 1,000 times a year in state capitols around the country, the group says. About 200 become law. ALEC pays for the meetings through membership fees (called donations) that corporations pay. The legislators receive travel stipends (called scholarships) to attend the meetings. ALEC is registered with the IRS as a nonprofit that provides a public service, not as a lobbyist that seeks to influence.

This offers two benefits: Corporate members can deduct yearly dues, which run up to $25,000—more if they want to sponsor meetings; and ALEC doesn’t have to disclose the names of legislators and executives who attend. That’s important, because if ALEC operated with complete openness it would have difficulty operating at all. ALEC has attracted a wide and wealthy range of supporters in part because it’s done its work behind closed doors. Membership lists were secret. The origins of the model bills were secret. Part of ALEC’s mission is to present industry-backed legislation as grass-roots work. If this were to become clear to everyone, there’d be no reason for corporations to use it.

Unfortunately for ALEC, that’s exactly what’s happening. Last year, government accountability group Common Cause successfully filed Freedom of Information Act requests with state legislators to learn more about their dealings with ALEC. At the same time, someone leaked ALEC’s internal bill library. All told, thousands of pages of internal ALEC documents were put online, including minutes and attendee lists for the last two years of meetings.

ColorofChange.org, a civil rights group, discovered in ALEC’s now-public library a model bill for voter ID laws passed by 34 states. The laws’ opponents say they suppress voting by minorities. In December the group began sending letters to ALEC’s corporate members asking how much they valued their minority customers. Since then McDonald’s (MCD), Wendy’s (WEN), Coca-Cola (KO), PepsiCo (PEP), Yum! Brands (YUM), Procter & Gamble (PG), and Intuit (INTU), among others, have stopped donating to ALEC. The corporate departures accelerated after the death of Trayvon Martin: Florida’s so-called stand-your-ground law also sits in ALEC’s model bill library.

In April, Common Cause sent a tax whistleblower complaint to the IRS, claiming ALEC is a lobbying group and seeking to strip its nonprofit status. Common Cause spokeswoman Mary Boyle says the group had been waiting for months for the right moment to lodge its complaint. “The Trayvon Martin thing was like a gift,” she says.

Quoting from the U.S. tax code, ALEC’s lawyer Alan Dye says the group engages “in nonpartisan analysis, study, or research” and therefore is not a lobbying group. In an e-mail, he says ALEC is the victim of a “committed effort by extreme liberal front groups to diminish ALEC’s effectiveness in supporting free-market solutions in the states. … ALEC does not lobby and makes every effort to ensure that its processes are effective and compliant.” Dye is certainly right about one thing: The groups attacking ALEC are committed to diminishing its effectiveness. Their most successful tactic has been simply to show what it does.

The bottom line: A trove of private ALEC documents was posted online, leading prominent companies, including Coca-Cola, to leave the group.

Related

• 

  Did the American Legislative Exchange Council Give Me the Full Story?

• 

  What Occupy Wall Street Gets Wrong About ALEC

Billionaire corporations behind RIGHT TO KILL laws

Most of us choose to live our lives in the ideal world where law makers represent us and our representative of our interests.

We think that laws are made because some act is immoral or harmful and thus needs to be legislated as a crime. We think legislators strive to protect us from crimes and thus make laws that do this very thing.

And we are completely ignoring the reality of contemporary America.

That reality is this:

1) Laws are made by people who are in no way demographically representative of us. Specifically, lawmakers are older, whiter, richer, and "maler" than the average person. That is, the law is largely made by rich old white males.

2) The people that vote for lawmakers are in most ways not demographically representative of us. Specifically, voters are are older, whiter, and richer than the average person.

3) Most people do not regularly vote.

4) Lawmakers spend a great portion of their time raising money to fund their political campaigns. In the case of winning US Senators this amounts to tens of thousands of dollars every day. And state legislators are also highly dependent on fundraising to win their seats.

5) The candidate who raises and spends the most money almost always wins.

6) Most of us do not give any substantial amount of money to political parties or candidates in any given year. Specifically, far less than 1% of American citizens give $200 or more in any given year.

7) Money for political campaigns largely comes from the wealthy, corporations, Political Action Committees (PACs), and the Citizens United unleashed "Super PACs."

So what does all this have to do with crime and criminal justice?

It means the law will often represent the interests of the wealthy and powerful rather than us.

Just ask the family of young Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead by wanna-be cop George Zimmerman three weeks ago in Sanford, Florida.

Zimmerman told the police he acted in self-defense under Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law (so he was not arrested and remains free as of today).

The law allows a person to use deadly force when “he or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another.” Thus, if you think you or someone else is in danger, you can shoot to kill, regardless of whether the shooter is the one who initiated the hostile confrontation. You can also use deadly force to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony, thus meaning you are authorized to pursue and confront others (including a black kid wearing a hoodie walking in the rain with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea).

Interestingly, now at least 21 states have passed these laws. Given that crime and even violent crime have declined for decades, one might wonder why such laws are needed in the first place?

Here is the shocking truth. The laws were written and promoted by a largely unknown group of rich people called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). As show in this article, the legislation was adopted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as model legislation and promoted across the country with the help of their allies in the National Rifle Association.

According to the article:

"Florida's statute on the use of force in self-defense is virtually identical to Section 1 of ALEC's Castle Doctrine Act model legislation as posted on the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). According to CMD, the model bill was adopted by ALEC's Civil Justice Task in August 2005 -- just a few short months after it passed the Florida legislature -- and approved by its board of directors the following month.

Since the 2005 passage of Florida's law, similar statutes have been passed in 16 other states. This was no accident. In a 2008 interview with NRA News, ALEC resident fellow Michael Hough explained how his organization works with the NRA to push similar legislation through its network of conservative state legislators:

 

"HOUGH: We are a very pro-Second Amendment organization. In fact, last session, I'll get off-topic here real quick, but some of the things that we were pushing in states was the Castle Doctrine. We worked with the NRA on that, that's one of our model bills that we have states introduce."

What has been the impact of these new laws? Since these laws were enacted, the number of justifiable homicides recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation has increased from about 200 per year to almost 300 per year, just as predicted by critics of the laws.


In other words, more people are killing each other, the very opposite of what was expected by its promoters. In case you think the only people being killed are violent criminals, think of Trayvon Martin, whose only crime was "walking while black." Or any of these people.

Amazingly, this is the same group--ALEC--that adopted, promoted, and wrote Arizona's tough "show me your papers" anti-illegal immigration law, a law that clearly will not end illegal immigration since it is supported by the private prison industry (who only makes money if it locks up people who enter the country illegally!). If immigration stops, they lose money, meaning the law clearly is not aimed at stopping immigration! PS, I blogged about this before.

So what does all this mean?

It is clear evidence that the criminal law often does not represent us or our interests. In the case of the laws promoted by groups like ALEC and passed by state legislatures--often with little or no debate and with little or no public support or influence--the laws often end up up literally killing us.

Would you kindly take this money and consider this law for us? Thanks!

So you think the mainstream media would be all over it, right?

Nope. Silence.